This is crap reasoning
The main reason that vinyl wasn't put on magazines is because it is too fragile. The cost of producing vinyl records was much cheaper than cassettes.

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Fragility wasn't the issue - it was size. I have some vinyl EP's that were given free with the NME back in the 80's (they're not flexi discs), but 4 or 5 tracks was all you'd get on a 7 inch record, so they weren't very practical. Cassettes were much better because they could put an albums worth of music or more on one cassette. Those NME singles were just a bit of a novelty thing they did once, but mostly they put out sampler tapes which contained at least an hour's worth of music.

As for the cost of producing vinyl as against tapes, I agree that tapes should have been more expensive in terms of parts, but as they grew in popularity their production cost would have become significantly reduced for the record companies, because mass production always reduces costs. Also the cost of producing the inlay cards and printing expenses for cassettes would have been a fraction of those for vinyl albums, which were much larger and demanded a far higher quality finish. Shipping costs for vinyl records were also more expensive because of their greater size and weight.

I once made my own Queen cassingle: I copied Bohemian Rhapsody onto a tape, unscrewed the case and cut it off where the song finished, chucked away the excess tape and glued the end to the empty spindle, then screwed it together again.

I dunno why I bothered to do it, mind. It must have made sense at the time.

Late 80s / early 90s is when I bought most of my vinyl. I guess all the shops I went to were just record shops or something. The tape sections were tiny.
Our Price, replay, maybe HMV began to do less in the 90s but I didn't shop there anyway.

I once made my own Queen cassingle: I copied Bohemian Rhapsody onto a tape, unscrewed the case and cut it off where the song finished, chucked away the excess tape and glued the end to the empty spindle, then screwed it together again.

I dunno why I bothered to do it, mind. It must have made sense at the time.

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My mum bought the actual cassingle when freddy mercury died, for the car. It was an auto reverse tape player too so the song could play over and over and over again to infinite

when i was about 7 i got taken by a nice family who kind of adopted me as their third son ( i was friends with one of their sons from school) on a very nice holiday to portugal - we all got the ferry over to Spain and drove all the way down to Algarve and back, camping along the way... great experience it was, some great early memories...anyhow, in the car they had two tapes, one was some episodes of the Goon Show, and the other was the first Dire Straits album, which basically got played over and over again...i wont hear a bad word said about that album, and even then i could tell Sultans of Swing was a big tune

i think theres something inherent to tapes that you listen to them over and over more than other formats

Got this on right now at work. There are at least 2 all time House classics on it, and the rest is just completely brilliant and a bit bonkers. Still got the receipt in the inlay (a weird thing I did with most tapes), £6.49 from Our Price in January 1990

i had a flexidisc (which i think i finally binned this year) called Songs for Swinging Voters put out in 1964 by the Conservative Party. There was zero merit in it though, one for the bin. BLue plastic too

i had a flexidisc (which i think i finally binned this year) called Songs for Swinging Voters put out in 1964 by the Conservative Party. There was zero merit in it though, one for the bin. BLue plastic too

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I still have a Jonathan King gold flexi disc from when he was running to be an MP in Richmond or somewhere.

I've got a few flexi-discs in fact. I quite like the crapness/cheapness of them.

Well, it's art isn't it? Fits in well with the general post-industrial vibe of the music and the label. The guy who made the boxes is a Manchester artist who works mainly in concrete, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear that the concept was dreamed up during a stoned conversation between the artist and the label owner...

Tapes were useless when you way too often got the infamous 'tape salad' with long loops popping out and you had to use pencils to try and tighten them up again, but they'd always got too twirled up and you either ended up with knots and a broken tape or a nasty surprise when you tried playing the tape after you thought you'd fixed it again only to discover that the audio for the entire B-side now played backwards to eerie effect...